Queen of the Wave

The sample-happy Finnish electro-pop duo compose an "esoteric pop opera in three parts."

Truth be told, I probably won't listen to Queen of the Wave ever again, but "The Storm" will always have my undying respect. There are plenty of times where I doubt whether I can legitimately be surprised anymore, but upon encountering this song in anticipation of Finnish duo Pepe Deluxé's new album, I was on some straight Trapaholics "DAMN SON, WHERE'D YOU FIND THIS?" shit. Pepe Deluxé have been around since the late 1990s as sample-happy, electro-pop jokers and you could put "The Storm" in a lineage of va-va-voom bombast ranging from Shirley Bassey to the "1812 Overture", so it wasn't totally out of nowhere. Nonetheless, it left me truly curious as to what sort of album could possibly contain it. But Queen of the Wave's simply soul-deadening abundance makes the answer seem awfully predictable in hindsight: You know the rich spectrum of human emotion captured in the facial expression of someone who ordered the fully-loaded nachos and then realized, "I'm gonna eat that?" once it's brought out? Queen of the Wave mostly exists toward the tail end of that spectrum.

Fitting too, since it's the sort of record that's far more attractive when its ingredients are merely listed out of context. Pepe Deluxé have certainly upped the extracurricular ante for this thing, as you can help yourself to up to five Album Companions annotating the production of Queen of the Wave. This includes the use of Edison's "Ghost Machine", a 500,000-volt Tesla Coil synthesizer, and, most prominently, the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia's Luray Caverns-- one of the songs here is seemingly about the world's largest instrument ("Temple of Unfed Fire") and another actually features it ("In the Cave"). And right there on the cover, Pepe Deluxé promise an "esoteric pop opera in three parts," which begins in earnest on "Queenswave". A web of gentle acoustic arpeggios get spun over a chunky bassline melody and oscillating bird calls while a stacked-octave harmony intones, "Let me a song for you/ Let me spin a tale that's true/ A story about the days of gold/ A story more than ages old." That's about as minimalist as things get here, and a flurry of flutes come in a moment later.

Pepe Deluxé claim narrative inspiration in the Atlantis fantasies "A Dweller on Two Planets" and its sequel "An Earth Dweller's Return", so of course, the tale isn't true, it isn't about the days of gold, and it's actually from the 19th century. No worries, this wouldn't be the first concept record to successfully overcome a completely nonsensical or nonexistent plot-- the "story" serves more as a framework for Pepe Deluxé to spin their usual surrealistic foolery. The problem is that while Queen of the Wave is ostensibly meant as a whirlwind, genre-hopping excursion that can match its wild literary ambitions, most of it circles back to 1999's idea of 1969, or, more ominously, a dystopian vision of Austin Powers making Midnite Vultures. Which is even worse than it sounds as it amplifies all their flaws: the painful mugging, Cool Britannia kitsch, overbearing spy soundtrack vocals, and the most indiscriminate track stuffing imaginable. Did you ever think it'd be possible for a song to somehow merge Air's "Sexy Boy" and the Go! Team? Probably not, and for the same reasons you wouldn't expect fish to have lungs, but "Go Supersonic" scoffs in the face of evolution and fails loudly in its attempts to do so.

In both title and execution, "Go Supersonic" is Pepe Deluxé's compositional M.O., but unlike similar exploratory thrift-store epics like Since I Left You or even Blueberry Boat,Queen of the Wave is just no fun. Whether it's the Spy vs. Spy freakout achieved by the volleys of timbales and horns on "Hesperus Garden" or the modal folk scales of the surely winking "Contain Thyself", there's no maneuverability or dynamics, nothing to explore, no depth to the stacks upon stacks of overdubs. Nothing earns its place in the mix and rather than demonstrating boundless creativity, every stereo-panned drum roll or harpsichord lick feels custodial or the result of sheer boredom. I'm sure this is capable of finding a cult audience if only because I know plenty of people who play Grand Theft Auto using all the cheat codes, but even after a dozen or so listens, the only things that stick are fashioned from blunt repetition: the cheerleader hook from "Go Supersonic", "A Night and a Day"'s jutting surf riff, the Wagnerian convulsions of "The Storm". All fairly simple musical ideas and yet they prove more enduring than the budget-blowing gimmicks.

Considering its absurd execution and basis in an arcane literary work, I can't help but think of John Carter, which is similarly not all that bad but will forever serve as a parable of excess as opposed to a work of art. Of course, for all the talk of stubborn auteurs and inexperienced executives, the most glaring flaw was how Disney spent a gazillion dollars on an ad campaign that gave nobody even the slightest idea of what the movie was actually about. Likewise, Queen of the Wave is every bit as intriguing and batshit as an elevator pitch and something of a visionary work the band is clearly proud of. But it's ultimately up to the artist to generate a reason for the audience to actually care, and whether it's in terms of melody, narrative, or emotional resonance, Queen of the Wave just makes you lay prostrate at the feet of Pepe Deluxé in the hopes that you won't mind them relentlessly hammering you with tacky quirks and leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.